Flour Fights

This is just a jog sideways here, but it just came to me. When I worked at H.E.B. I worked with 2 guys who later became good friends. Richard Green, and Lloyd Waitschies. There wasn’t paint-ball at this time, so we invented our own kind of mock war games.

At the H.E.B we sold flour in 20, and 50 lbs. bags. I know this sounds unbelievable, but in those days, people bought in large quantities to bake bread, and make desserts at home. Anyway, sometimes the large bags of flour would get ripped open, and couldn’t be sold. Normally they would be thrown out. Lloyd, Richard,  and I would take the bags to Richard’s home and store them in his garage.  Also from H.E.B we would buy/mis-appropriate  #2 bags from the store. #2 bags are about the 1/3 the size of a paper lunch bag. About once a month usually during the summer, we three would meet at Richard’s house and start assembling our ammo. We would fill each #2 bag about half full, roll the top down tight, and then staple the top closed. We usually did this like an assembly line. I would fill the bags, Richard would roll the top down, and Lloyd would staple. The finished product was tight and fit in the palm of your hand, kind of like a hand grenade. When we finished we would have what seemed like hundreds of bags ready. I’m sure it was far less than a hundred, but that’s the way I remember it.

Once the ammo was ready, we would take it out to an rural area that Richard’s dad owned and have a battle. You have to visualize this. The area was brown, dusty, and covered with mesquite brush. The three of us, and sometimes others would pick teams and have a battle. It didn’t matter if you got hit by someone else, you didn’t die, you were just wounded. We would continue until we ran out of ammo. When the battle was over the area looked like a winter wonderland. And most of us looked like ghosts. It was great fun, and no body got hurt except for scrapes and scratches from mesquite bushes.